When users search for websites and other information on the Internet, they may not always obtain the desired results. In many cases, users must carefully formulate their queries in order to obtain the information they are seeking. Some users, particularly novice users, do not have the skills, expertise, knowledge, experience, or patience to formulate a query that will yield the desired information.
Website authors, on the other hand, often have such expertise and are able to formulate queries that will provide information likely to be of use to visitors of those websites. Specialized search functionality often appears on websites, allowing visitors to those websites to see search results tailored to the particular content they are likely to be interested in, based on the fact that they are searching from that website. For example, a website devoted to traffic information can interpret a query such as “Interstate 280” differently than a general-purpose search site would provide. The fact that a user is visiting the traffic information website means that he or she is interested in traffic information.
However, it is not always convenient for users to visit a particular website in order to perform such a specialized search. Users may wish to perform all (or most) of their searches on a general-purpose search site, such as www.google.com, without having to visit different websites to perform different searches. Accordingly, it would be useful if third-party content providers could enable specialized searches on general-purpose search sites.
Furthermore, different users have different preferences, needs, and interests. Some users might be interested in searches relating to television shows, while other users may be interested in searches relating to weather around the world. It would be beneficial, therefore, for users to have the ability to specify which types of specialized searches they are interested in, so that specialized search results could be tailored to those affirmed areas of interest.